A newly formed “America First Caucus” in Congress, supported by a few far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives, is looking to recruit new members with an old set of arguments.
These white nationalist tropes found a receptive audience in the American people.
Its platform, now circulating in Washington, is little more than a retread of the white nationalist screeds of the 1910s and 1920s.
“America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions,” asserts the section on immigration. “History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country.”
A century ago, these same sorts of arguments about the “Anglo-Saxon” character of the United States and the threat that “foreign” elements would bring to its politics and culture were quite widespread.
During the late 1910s, as the United States reeled from a deadly pandemic, economic turmoil, race riots and a surge in immigration all at once, these white nationalist tropes found a receptive audience in the American people.
Bestselling books made the case. Madison Grant’s 1916 “The Passing of the Great Race” complained about unwanted demographic changes in terms familiar to us today. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, he warned, were not reproducing children fast enough to keep pace with “the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew.” Established “old stock” Americans, he grumbled, were “being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.”
In the 1920 publication “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy,” Lothrop Stoddard made the same claims, warning that white Americans were being engulfed by the more “fertile” nonwhite races. Americans of “Anglo-Saxon origin,” he insisted, had to restrict immigration to preserve their country for “future generations who have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man’s land.”
This popular panic over immigration helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, which pressed the issue aggressively in the early 1920s.
Meanwhile, in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Kenneth Roberts spread the same sorts of arguments to a general audience. He too warned about Polish Jews, whom he sneered at as “human parasites.” Unrestricted immigration, he warned, would create a “hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.”
This popular panic over immigration helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, which pressed the issue aggressively in the early 1920s.
The Klan’s imperial wizard warned in 1922 about “the tremendous influx of foreign immigration, tutored in alien dogmas and alien creeds, slowly pushing the native-born white American population into the center of the country, there to be ultimately overwhelmed and smothered.” In 1923, a meeting of grand dragons of the Klan focused a great deal on the supposed threat, asserting that the only true American was “one whose every thought and interest places America first above all other nations on Earth.”
The popular panic over immigration and the pseudo-scientific justifications for nativism and racism came together in the push for the National Origins Act of 1924, a quota-based measure that drastically reduced immigration from southeastern Europe and banned all Asians from immigrating entirely.
In the congressional debate, Sen. Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith, a South Carolina Democrat and a prominent segregationist, urged his colleagues to read the arguments Grant and others had made and to heed their warnings.
“Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock,” he said, that immigration restrictions were vitally needed. Such arguments carried the day. The National Origins Act was passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress, with equally strong support from both parties. President Calvin Coolidge then signed the measure into law, marking a significant turning point in American history. For centuries, people from all over the globe had rushed to the New World to find their freedom, their fortune or a bit of both. The new restrictions changed that, closing the door to the United States and all it had been thought to represent. The popular panic over immigration and the pseudo-scientific justifications for nativism and racism came together in the push for the National Origins Act of 1924. But the white nationalist panic in America did more than change its own immigration policy. As historian James Q. Whitman and others have chronicled, the National Origins Act in turn served as a model for the “racial citizenship” laws that took root in Germany a decade later. “The United States of the new world have come to understand the monstrous danger of the ‘great melting pot of races’ over the course of the last decades, and put a check on bastardization through draconian immigration law,” a Nazi Party publication noted in 1933. “To these circles of tribally related Americans we reach out our hand in friendship.” America’s immigration restriction, along with the segregation statutes in the South, ultimately stood as the inspiration for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. And those laws, in turn, provided Germans with the legal justification for the Holocaust itself. History isn’t predictive, of course. But if the America First Caucus wants to argue what history has shown us, then let’s not ignore what it has shown us about their own arguments. We need to remember the dangerous ends and drastic horrors such arguments led us to before and might well lead us to again.
Kevin M. Kruse
Kevin M. Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton University. A specialist in modern American political, social and urban/suburban history, he is the author and editor of several books, including "White Flight" (2005), "One Nation Under God" (2015) and "Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974" (2019). He grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and earned his bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his master's and doctoral degrees from Cornell University. 
